Justin Kemppainen - The Legend of Ivan

Worse yet were my own personal movements, most of which were too worthless to even mention.

Even before I made it out of the solar system of Old Earth, a single-passenger vessel caught up with me. The individual inside was one of the security guards who hoped to get a chance to speak with me. I sensed a certain awe and bizarre hero worship for my kind, which instantly put me in a foul mood.

“I totally have information for you. Ivan information!” he exclaimed over the communicator. “I can come with and help you search!” At once, I assumed some fraction of the meeting with Wilhelm seeped out.

After repeated flat denial, the mildly crestfallen man still begged me to stop at a fueling station, to have dinner and a drink with him, and to allow him to tell me the story that burned in his mind: his encounter with Ivan.

I gave him ten minutes to talk while we both progressed towards the edge of the gravity well.

“Sure, I’ll take what I can get.” The enthusiasm he provided was more irritating than Wilhelm’s. “You’re gonna love this.”

I did not.

He launched into some pointless story mirroring that of the one I was just told. He swore that Ivan, by himself, raided the casino not for a hefty payday but to free some woman, the apparent love of his life. Why she was there, how he completed it, and everything else was left absent, and I suspected it was because my clinging friend hadn’t quite figured those parts out yet.

In about seven minutes, I was almost ready to blast him out of the sky to rid myself of the high-pitched babble and his absurd tale. Limbs torn off, bare-handed smashing through the vaults, and inexplicable detail of a pointless seduction of a female guard, it became a rambled tale of heroism without a grain of sensibility.

Nothing seemed to be remotely true, and I found myself pining for the company of the alleged Dr. Trevors, likely still crawling around the conduits of Ethra and searching for the illusive conspiracy which would validate his lunacy. At least the madman’s story had relative sense to it, not some rambled mash of improbable events.

I was able to extract myself from the clutches of the admirer and depart to the next location. Sullen though he was at my firm rejection, the fellow allowed me to leave in peace.

The border world of Rupe, implying as much refinement as the brevity of its name, was a cornucopia of various ore production. It’s decadent display of brown tones and endless fields of dirt housed my next pointless inquiry.

A bar, of course a bar, had been burned to the ground eight years prior. In a bout of wild and outlandish claims, the owner managed to get his insurance paid out because he attributed the damage with some measure of evidence to Ivan.

The owner was a half-senile, amoral crackpot with an incredibly foul mouth. This fellow was openly hostile, glaring at my, “Godramn mettle bits,” and cursing my name at every opportunity. This was shortly before trying to, “Rid the cusswirping glalacky,” of my particular nuisance by way of murder.

Tranquilizers calmed him down.

Racism aside, his hostility was also due to the fact that he believed I was investigating him for the successful fraud which allowed him to live his sunset years in meager retirement. He told me this after he pulled a flechette pistol, attempted to kill me, and ended up cradling a sprained wrist while contemplating why so many hours went by and why his head became so foggy.

As it turned out, the rampaging brawl of his bar provided cover enough to start a variety of, as the claims company described it, “incendiary incident,” though not entirely accidental. By mentioning the enigma of Ivan in his report, it shifted the focus away from any fraud investigation to the company’s hotly-debated policy on Ivan-related claims. Eventually, the meager sum was paid out.

Tempted, though I was, to tattle on the elderly buffoon, I felt satisfied his quality of life remained in the realm of filth, decay, and rotting teeth. Prison might have been a step higher.

In either case, the old man’s mind had transformed to a festering crock in his sunset years, and I gained nothing worthwhile save for a near miss and an impressive stench which clung to my clothing long after.

I suspected this unpleasant odor became the reason for my next failure. My contact, meeting on Dei Lucrii XXII, handled my company for five minutes before finishing with, “Yeah, nothing else turned up. It smells awful here, so I’m gonna go.” It was another failed inquiry into the prominent Ivan rumor of involvement at Caldonis and New Prague.

My subsequent flight was spent reading some manner of holy documentation. Not yet desperate enough, I decided against an encounter with one of the several Ivan-related religions.

His reputation born of Atropos Garden dragged dispute into who and what he could be. For some, the devastation was thought not to be created by man, instead considered an act of divine retribution. This meant, to them, Ivan himself was an agent of the almighty. It seemed too absurd, so I continued to avoid it.

Bloodsport and gladiatorial combat as entertainment developed almost fresh leads. Two dozen individuals over the last eleven years had claimed the Ivan mantle, for publicity reasons, and a few had seen lucrative success. Thanks to thorough scrutiny, the GSA eliminated each as a real candidate.

My stop and chat with former gladiators was more of a long-shot attempt at locating Traverian Grey, as it seemed he blew through the combat on a number of occasions. Still nothing; no one remaining had the slightest notion as to where he retired or even if he remained alive.

Frustration mounting, I passed over opportunities to speak with individuals about Ivan’s apparently amazing scientific research. The same applied to his varied presence in popular culture, including music, film, and literature references. As with everything else, these areas adopted the name with no referential knowledge of the reality.

Ivan was the boogeyman, a frightener of children, and denizen of a thousand successful heists of every shape and size. He fought armies and slaughtered millions. He built orphanages and blasted them to fragments. His legendary physique crippled feminine inhibitions, his strength could move mountains, and he could build a starship out of his teeth. He was a pure-blood human without synthetic taint, he was a robot, a demon, and God himself.

I made one other stop. It was a small story, unsubstantiated but largely ignored due to a lack of fantastical or devastative nature. Something about it rang true for me.

The middle-aged man was crippled with traumatic brain injury, only fragments of his memory remaining, shifting and changing without his lucid recollection. The onset of this damage was similar to my own: a dock working accident. Perhaps that was what piqued my interest.

His tale was not a tale at all. Details slipped from him over the years, and his lack of finances provided little opportunity to repair the damage done by his experience with the icy death of nothing.

The man told me in person, as I drew curious enough to hear it firsthand. The story lasted two minutes as the former blue-collar highlighted the accident and his rescue. A coworker, a gigantic bear of a man, went EVA without protection for thirty seconds to retrieve his coworker from certain death.

Hospitalized and comatose for many months, the injured man never received a chance to thank his savior. “He called himself Ivan,” the man croaked from his bed, respirator gently pumping air into his lungs.

I asked, “Are you familiar with Atropos Garden?”

“Who?” Confusion enveloped his features, and upon further prodding it seemed he’d never heard of Ivan as this master of brutality who plagued the galaxy. Though possible his scrambled memory had picked up the name somewhere and inserted it as his personal savior, it didn’t feel like that to me.